Various systems, such as various types of vehicles and the systems and subsystems that comprise the vehicles, may be subject to potentially severe environmental conditions, shock, vibration, and normal component wear. These conditions, as well as others, may have deleterious effects on vehicle operability. These deleterious effects, if experienced during operation, could leave little time for corrective actions. Hence, most notably in the context of vehicles, health monitoring/management systems are increasingly being used. Vehicle health monitoring/management systems monitor various health-related characteristics of the vehicle. Such operational health characteristics may, in some instances, be further decomposed to the health characteristics of major operational systems and subsystems of the vehicle.
Some presently known vehicle health management systems include monitors that gather data from sensors and other onboard signals to produce results. These results are then provided to a reasoner, which tries to diagnose the health of the vehicle based on this information. Sometimes, this information arrives at the reasoner slowly or not at all. For example, prior to lift-off of an autonomous vehicle, no commands have been provided to the control effectors, and health management has insufficient information with which to diagnose effector health. To overcome this deficiency, it is common to perform pre-flight checks that exercise the control effectors to verify their operation. As a second example, if a suspected effector fault occurs during the flight of the autonomous vehicle, it would be desirable to assess the health of the effector as soon as possible after onset. Since there are times during the flight where the commands are minimal, assessing the health could entail deliberately exercising the suspected effector, while taking care to maintain control. The deficiency in quantity and type of health information or the rate of generation of the information may limit the ability of the health management system to provide a prompt assessment of the vehicle capabilities, potentially endangering the mission, the vehicle, or both.
Hence, there is a need for a system and method that will accelerate the information flow into a health management system to be able to provide more prompt diagnoses of system health. The present invention addresses at least this need.